Rabih Alameddine

Rabih Alameddine (Arabic: ربيع علم الدين; born 1959) is an American painter and writer.^[1] His 2021 novel The Wrong End of the Telescope won the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.^[2]

Rabih Alameddine
Rabih Alameddine in 2017
Born	1959 (age 65–66) Amman, Jordan
Alma mater	University of California at Los Angeles
Occupation	Novelist

Early life

Alameddine was born in Amman, Jordan to Lebanese Druze^[3] parents. (Alameddine identifies as an atheist).^[4]

He grew up in Kuwait and Lebanon, which he left at age 17 to live first in England and then in California to pursue higher education. He earned a degree in engineering from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and a Master of Business in San Francisco. Alameddine is gay.^[5]

Career

Alameddine began his career as an engineer, then moved to writing and painting. His debut novel Koolaids, which touched on both the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco and the Lebanese Civil War, was published in 1998 by Picador.^[6]

The author of six novels and a collection of short stories, Alameddine was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. His queer sensibility has added a different slant to narratives about immigrants within the context of what became known as Orientalism.^[7]

He has lived in San Francisco and Beirut. ^[8]

Awards and honors

In 2014, Alameddine was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and he won the California Book Awards Gold Medal Fiction for An Unnecessary Woman.^[9][10]

Alameddine is best known for this novel, which tells the story of Aaliya, a Lebanese woman and translator living in war-torn Lebanon. The novel "manifests traumatic signposts of the [Lebanese] civil war, which make it indelibly situational, and accordingly latches onto complex psychological issues."^[11]

In 2017, Alameddine won the Arab American Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction for The Angel of History.^[12][13]

In 2018 he was teaching in the University of Virginia's creative writing program, in Charlottesville.^[14]

He was shortlisted for the 2021 Sunday Times Short Story Award for his story, "The July War".^[15]

His novel The Wrong End of the Telescope won the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.^[2]

Works

• Koolaids: The Art of War (1998)
• The Perv: Stories (1999)
• I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters (2001)
• The Hakawati (2008)
• An Unnecessary Woman (2014)
• The Angel of History: A Novel (2016)
• The Wrong End of the Telescope (2021)
• Comforting Myths: Concerning the Political in Art (2024)